


Five Ways to Wake in Atlantis

by tormalyne



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 10:20:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tormalyne/pseuds/tormalyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney wakes to the muted thrum of a room full of machines busily churning away at numbers, equations, and the distances between stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways to Wake in Atlantis

1.  
They wake curled around each other, their even breathing matched to the easy rhythm of the waves drifting in through the open balcony door. Looking at each other, they cannot remember names; there is only the two of them in a high vaulted room and their single nest of stark white sheets on the gleaming, not-quite metallic floor.  They both have scars, different, unique sets stretching across pale and paler skin, and he remembers the dark, horrible humming, a closed, claustrophobic coffin ( _sarcophagus_ ) that keeps them alive. He shivers, something flickering behind his eyes - faces, names, a gleaming city rising from the sea, and sighs against her neck. A soft touch, fingers soothing at his temple and he almost sinks back to sleep but they both still, both quiet their breathing at the heavy clank of iron boots outside the room.  The door slides open noiselessly, and he almost thinks that he has seen others do that, a countless number of silent doors opening onto silvery corridors and a room with a bright, shining ring, and then _she_ is looking at them, dressed in red and grey and her eyes glowing gold.

 

2.  
John wakes to an empty bed and the odd stillness of the Atlantis night; no audibly buzzing vents circulate air through the city and his room is too far away from the perimeter to hear the wash of waves against pier. Rodney has crept back to his lab, leaving rumpled sheets, a dent in his pillow, and a hastily-scrawled message on a scrap of paper poking out of John’s left boot.  When he dresses, John finds a full sheet of paper, this one blank, sticking out of the sleeve of his jacket and folded lengthwise in half. He sprawls out on the bed, the two pieces of paper sitting side by side on the mattress, and tries to remember sixth grade English class. If he can fold himself an F-302 before the morning briefing, Rodney’s scribble says, John might wake up to coffee instead of empty sheets the next day.

 

3.  
Rodney wakes to the muted thrum of a room full of machines busily churning away at numbers, equations, and the distances between stars. He has three day’s worth of stubble on his chin to match his rumpled clothes, USAF issue jacket tossed carelessly over one of the empty stools.  He is alone, twenty seven levels under Cheyenne Mountain, and when he glances at the clock on his open laptop he finds he has to actually concentrate to make the conversion from Atlantis Standard to Mountain Time. He tells himself that he doesn’t notice the sterile, gray walls, hasn’t had time to start missing the organic sweep of corridors rising over the sea.  Rodney doesn’t think about John Sheppard and the empty husk of a drained ZPM he left behind. Instead, he bends his head over the hand-written sheet of equations that have dried in the few scant minutes he didn’t mean to sleep.

 

4.  
Elizabeth wakes screaming, dragged from unconsciousness. The Wraith are here, she has watched them kill Zelenka and Grodin, Bates and Ford, and now she bites her lip until it bleeds as Rodney is drained in front of her eyes. They keep her alive, they tell her, because she is the matron, the one who will lead them to Earth. No, she wants to scream, no, I will never show you the way home, but she has only to glance at John’s still form to know that she will tell them everything before the hand even touches her chest.

 

5.  
Bates wakes from a dreamless sleep, climbing from his tiny bed and dressing, pressing the radio into his ear. He nods to Wilson, on watch in the gateroom, walking the perimeter of the inhabited sections. The night is uneventful and he returns to his bed, content to sleep for two more hours before he wakes to meet with Sheppard, Atlantis untroubled for one single, glorious night.


End file.
